Teenager left hanging by broken leg on power line after car crash explains why it took an hour to save her
Warning: This article contains graphic content which some readers may find distressing
A teenager who was left hanging by her broken leg on a power line has explained why it took an hour to save her.
At just 16-years-old, Kennedy Littledike lost her leg after a car crash while out with her friends.
She was driving home in 2021 when she became emotional about her recent break up, started crying and lost control of her vehicle. The Idaho teen pulled the wheel as the car started to veer left but ended up over-correcting it.
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Littledike explained to Inside Edition: "I went off the road on the right side. My side of the vehicle hit the power pole, and we started flipping and rolling.
"We didn't have our seat belts. So when we were flipping, and I was the first one out, I wasn't on the ground. I was actually hanging in the power line by my broken leg.”
Littledike flew 30 feet into the air, with her arm tearing backwards and ‘hanging on by the skin on [her] back’ while her upper thigh snapped over the wire and hung in front of her face.
Despite these wild injuries, she didn’t quite realise just how badly she’d been hurt until she was freed and taken to hospital.
But while first responders worked to retrieve her from the power line, it took quite some time.
“It took an hour because first they had to get the power shut off,” Littledike explained.
She described how they eventually were able to grab her leg but had ‘to take it out of the wire’.
“You just watch my body lifelessly fall on the stretcher when they put the tourniquet on and had to take my bone back off the wire,” the teen added.
“They said I screamed and then once I hit the stretcher it was just silent.”
As she lay there waiting to be rushed to hospital, she can’t remember if she expressed her dark thought in her ‘mind or actually said it’.
“But I remember feeling like saying 'thank you for trying to save my life but this is it for me', and I remember like closing my eyes and just, done,” she recalled.
Littledike was left with a broken femur, a broken humerus bone, a broken clavicle and a brachial plexus injury.
Doctors performed a total of five amputations on her leg, each time hoping to save as much as they could.
And nowadays, she has a totally different outlook on life and says she’s ‘so much happier’.
Jess Battison